Case Study: Northpower achieves resilient storm-ready dispatch communications with Microsoft Azure

High-resilience cloud app to help NZ power co. withstand major storm or earthquake

Northpower, a New Zealand power distribution company, faced the challenge of ensuring high-resilience communications for dispatching field engineers during major storms or earthquakes when its own infrastructure was at risk. To maintain an out-of-band connection for service requests, they partnered with Microsoft Corporation and selected the Microsoft Azure cloud platform to build a robust business-to-business application.

Microsoft implemented a solution using Azure App Services, including Azure Web Apps and Logic Apps, to create the "Reactive" application. This provided exceptional resilience at a low operational cost of NZ$10 per day and allowed Northpower to scale instantly during peak demand. The project was delivered rapidly, taking just 400 development hours, and resulted in long-term cost savings by eliminating the need for the company to maintain its own hardware.

Northpower

Alex Douglas

Information Services Manager